Experts dispute Nobel Prize winner's claim that COVID-19 was infused with HIV

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Luc Montagnier announced recently that the novel coronavirus, which is at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak, was created in a laboratory and combined with some genes from the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)-1. However, other experts dispute the finding.

Montagnier, who shared the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in 2008 for his work on HIV, reported that someone added sequences, in particular, of HIV to the coronavirus, according to French CNews channel.

“It is not natural,” Montagnier said. “It's the work of professionals, of molecular biologists ... a very meticulous work."

As previously reported in Tech Startup, Montagnier further stated that “in order to insert an HIV sequence into this genome, molecular tools are needed, and that can only be done in a laboratory” and could not be the result of a natural recombination.

HIV has been found to attack cells and if left without treatment can lead to the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and death, according to the U.S. government’s HIV website.

The coronavirus, which has caused over 55,000 deaths in the U.S. to date, according to the CDC, is also known as SARS-CoV-2. Most scientists believe it has a natural origin.

David Robertson, co-author of a study called “Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic,” hypothesizes that there is an established pool of unsampled coronaviruses in the horseshoe bat population from which SARS-CoV-2 is anticipated to have originated.

“SARS-CoV-2 is just too different genetically from any previous virus we knew about and biologically different to have been created in a lab,” Robertson told Current Science Daily. “Also, in terms of its evolutionary patterns, it looks like a natural virus being related to viruses in bats and pangolins, which have only been discovered post-COVID-19 emergence.”

According to Robertson, the precise bat virus from which SARS-CoV-2 originated is still unknown.

"The recombination signal we refer to in our paper was concerning the small part of SARS-CoV-2’s spike that is closer to a pangolin virus,” said Robertson. He believes his team’s analysis shows that “it's clear that its RaTG13 [a bat virus] that’s the recombinant virus as it moves away from the others." Robertson continued, "It doesn’t mean that the SARS2 virus isn’t recombinant, just that it's not recombinant with the viruses we’ve discovered to date." 

A prominent article in the top scientific journal Nature similarly concluded, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” 

That study compared the SARS-CoV-2 with the virus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak (SARS-CoV-1), analyzing their respective abilities to interact with a key enzyme in human lung tissue called ACE2, thereby infecting humans. It found that the current coronavirus’s ability to bind with ACE2 was “not ideal,” suggesting the virus “is most likely the result of natural selection on a human” and “not the product of purposeful manipulation.” 

However, a recent paper in the journal Science found that the novel coronavirus could bind with ACE2 “with higher affinity” than the earlier SARS-CoV-1 virus that caused the 2003 outbreak. 

Chairman of the board of Carthronix, Rex Parris, says Montagnier's finding should not be discounted.

"People don't believe him because we don’t have enough knowledge about it," said Parris. "It should undergo independent research by highly qualified scientists who come back with a report. It's not in the best interest of the world to refuse to fully investigate a Nobel Prize winner's determinations."

Carthronix is a scientific laboratory in Lancaster, California that originated out of the University of Southern California.

"We have two small molecules in animal studies that would keep people from dying of the coronavirus by interrupting the process of sepsis but it has not yet reached human trials," Parris said. "We are a year away from human trials."

The possibility of performing genetic engineering on viruses with the potential to cause pandemics is not new. A 2015 research paper coauthored by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) highlighted the high risk of reemergence of the 2003 SARS virus based on controversial research that genetically manipulated that virus in the laboratory. 

“On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo,” wrote the paper. “Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.” 

That research led Nature to ask at that time “whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.”

A now-retracted paper by two Chinese scientists speculated that a laboratory within the WIV may have been the source of the virus currently causing the COVID-19 pandemic. According to their report, the WIV is located a few hundred meters from an open market in Wuhan, China, which is widely thought to be the original location of the pandemic’s outbreak. 

Nearly a year ago, a Chinese scientist was banned from a highly contagious research lab called National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada under suspicion of a policy breach, according to media reports.